US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6913

On February 18 2017 11:34 biology]major wrote:
xdaunt, I'm generally with you on the media bashing and that declaring them an "enemy" is not facism, but it's a cheap shot. Also, what is your opinion on Trump's bromance with Putin in light of recent leaks? Do you find it problematic?

I have confidence that Mattis will be independent in running DoD and will resign if it comes to worst case scenario, and so far he is holding ground and flat out saying Russia and USA are not ready to work together on the ground.

"Yes, it's true, and it's not because of anything obviously Donald Trump did. The press did all that good work ruining its reputation on its own, and we can have a long conversation about what created that," Dickerson said.

"Part of it, though, is what you mentioned about the local weather report, which is to say a lot of hysterical coverage about every little last thing that doesn't warrant it," he added.

On February 18 2017 11:39 Plansix wrote:
Its funny because no one here said Trump was doing anything unconstitutional. Only that his tactics are the same ones that dictators, authoritarians and corruption politicians like Nixon used. That undermining basic facts and attacking the press and judicial branch is straight out of the facist handbook.

Unconstitutional is a pretty high bar.

President Donald Trump this week abruptly dropped the nation's commitment to a two-state solution for Middle East peace — without reviewing the specifics of his new strategy with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

State Department officials and Tillerson's top aides learned about the president's comments in real time, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. Tillerson himself was in the air when Trump announced the change in the longstanding U.S. position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the White House, there was little thought about notifying the nation's top diplomat because, as one senior staffer put it, "everyone knows Jared [Kushner] is running point on the Israel stuff."

For a president who declared on Thursday he had assembled “one of the great Cabinets in American history,” sidelining Tillerson was an unorthodox way to utilize one of his top-tier picks. But it follows a pattern from Trump's first month in office, where the president is operating without seeking much input from his more experienced Cabinet secretaries — including Defense Secretary James Mattis and Tillerson, as well as Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and CIA Director Mike Pompeo — a group one GOP source called "the grownups."

Trump’s West Wing, a team of rivals marked by seemingly endless infighting, leaking and inexperience, has helped unify the partially formed Cabinet into an actual team, according to interviews with more than a dozen senior staffers inside the agencies and the White House who were not authorized to speak on the record.

In their first weeks on the job, the heads of these sometimes competitive departments and agencies are working together, fighting to staff the agencies they lead and to maximize their collective influence over an administration struggling to find stability. Their shared hope: that things will get better.

“I wouldn’t take the snapshot of the situation today and say that’s what things will look like in June,” said Elliott Abrams, whom Trump nixed as Tillerson’s undersecretary of state because he’d criticized the then-GOP nominee during the campaign. “Once all the jobs are filled at State, Defense and NSC, I think you’ll see a more orderly process.”

Even though the administration is less than a month old, both Tillerson and Mattis have been in perpetual cleanup mode, making calls to leaders around the world with far less drama and unpredictability than Trump's own calls and traveling to assuage the anxieties of key allies in Asia and Europe. Both have spent much of their first weeks in office in other countries, reassuring allies about Trump’s ad hoc approach to foreign policy that is being driven largely by the president’s son-in-law.

Kushner, officially a White House senior adviser, has become something of a foreign policy proxy in the White House — a “shadow secretary of state,” as one administration source described him — corresponding with governments at Trump's request. That’s causing consternation at Foggy Bottom, as top State Department officials, foreign policy experts and embassy officials are frozen out of foreign policy decisions and often unsure who is doing what, or who is responsible.

Mattis, Tillerson and Pompeo continue to butt heads with the White House over personnel decisions, fighting to pick their own staffs against an administration that has rewarded campaign staff with government positions and remains wary of establishment figures. According to a source close to the CIA director, Pompeo is not happy that Trump, frustrated by leaks from the intelligence community, floated the idea of appointing a hedge funder and political supporter, Stephen Feinberg, to investigate his agency.

Tillerson, who was confirmed after Mattis and Kelly, arrived at the State Department with just two staffers of his own and found that it was teeming with political appointees, according to a source close to Tillerson. Many of those appointees are part of "beachhead teams," campaign veterans assigned to serve for the first 120 days of the administration. Whether they remain there will be up to the Cabinet secretaries, who can hire them to permanent positions or replace them after they are confirmed, the White House said. “Senate Democrats have done everything they can to stand in the way of getting our highly qualified Cabinet nominees confirmed for these key positions," said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary. “Once we are able to get our nominees confirmed, we have a process to expedite getting key staff in place.”

As Tillerson and Mattis have tried to staff their respective departments, they have faced resistance from the White House and reluctance from many potential top appointees who are ambivalent about joining this chaotic administration. Vice Admiral Robert Harward, Mattis’ former CENTCOM deputy and a preferred choice to replace Michael Mike Flynn, who resigned his post as national security adviser Monday night, turned the job down Thursday in part over concerns about whether he would have authority over policy and his own staff hiring.

“There’s a real danger here,” said Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense who worked on Mitt Romney's 2012 defense transition. “If you have a former Navy SEAL like Harward turning down his commander in chief, he must have some real concerns about the way this is structured.” Harward, in a statement Thursday, cited personal and financial concerns as a main reason for turning down the job.

Flynn’s resignation marked a win for Mattis and Tillerson. An early Trump campaign supporter and the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency with a penchant for indulging conspiracy theories, Flynn helped crystallize an early partnership between Mattis and Tillerson.

On February 18 2017 11:42 xDaunt wrote:

If it's not unconstitutional, then there's nothing wrong with it. And if there's nothing wrong with it, then the complaints are nothing but baseless whining.

On February 18 2017 11:29 xDaunt wrote:

The problem is that the left has its head so far up its posterior on what the press is doing that it is conflating completely legitimate rhetoric with unconstitutional governmental action. There is nothing unconstitutional about relentlessly criticizing the press. There is nothing unconstitutional about pointing out very obvious instances of bias from the press and highlighting them for the public to see using the power of the bully pulpit. And perhaps most fundamental of all, the Constitution does not give the press carte blanche to attack its political oppositIon without fear of purely rhetorical reprisal. But hey, the left trying to silence the opposition is nothing new.

On February 18 2017 11:42 xDaunt wrote:

If it's not unconstitutional, then there's nothing wrong with it. And if there's nothing wrong with it, then the complaints are nothing but baseless whining.

On February 18 2017 12:04 Plansix wrote:
It's easy to justify any view if you assume the majority of the county is against you and hold you in contempt.

Though it doesn't sound like a sustainable way to practice politics in a democracy when 60% of the country thinks the press is in the right.

On February 18 2017 12:08 xDaunt wrote:

Given the polls showing that a majority of the public distrusts the press, I think that it is safe to say that you're way off base here.

On February 18 2017 12:12 Plansix wrote:

But we already established earlier that the polls are not accurate. Unless you want to admit that Trump is wildly unpopular.

John McCain said on Friday that Donald Trump’s administration was in “disarray” and that Nato’s founders would be alarmed by the growing unwillingness to “separate truth from lies”.

The Republican Senator broke with the reassuring message that US officials visiting Germany have sought to convey on their debut trip to Europe, telling a Munich security conference the resignation of the new president’s security adviser, Michael Flynn, over his contacts with Russia reflected deep problems in Washington.

“I think that the Flynn issue obviously is something that shows that in many respects this administration is in disarray and they’ve got a lot of work to do,” said McCain, a known Trump critic, even as he praised Trump’s defence secretary. “The president, I think, makes statements [and] on other occasions contradicts himself. So we’ve learned to watch what the president does as opposed to what he says,” he said.

Without mentioning the president’s name, McCain lamented a shift in the US and Europe away from the “universal values” that forged the Nato alliance seven decades ago. McCain also said the alliance’s founders would be “alarmed by the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies.”

The chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said “more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticising it as our moral equivalent”. The senator also regretted the “hardening resentment we see toward immigrants, and refugees, and minority groups, especially Muslims”.

European governments have been unsettled by the signals sent by Trump on a range of foreign policy issues ranging from Nato and Russia to Iran, Israel and European integration.

The debut trip to Europe of Trump’s defence secretary, Jim Mattis, and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to a meeting of G20 counterparts in Bonn, went some way to assuaging concerns as they both took a more traditional US position.

But Trump is wrestling with a growing controversy at home about potential ties between his aides and Russia, which he dismissed on Thursday as a “ruse” and “scam” perpetrated by a hostile news media.

Mattis made clear to allies, both at Nato in Brussels and in Munich, that the US would not retreat from leadership as the European continent grapples with an assertive Russia, wars in eastern and southern Mediterranean countries and attacks by Islamist militants.

US vice-president Mike Pence will address the Munich conference on Saturday with a similar message of reassurance. Pence will say Europe is an “indispensable partner”, a senior White House foreign policy adviser told reporters.

Mattis told a crowd that included heads of state and more than 70 defence ministers that Trump backed Nato. “President Trump came into office and has thrown now his full support to Nato. He too espouses Nato’s need to adapt to today’s strategic situation for it to remain credible, capable and relevant,” Mattis said.

Mattis said the US and its European allies had a shared understanding of the challenges ahead. Trump has alarmed allies by expressing admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

On February 18 2017 12:16 xDaunt wrote:

You need to be careful with the reckless apples and oranges comparisons. I only questioned the polls measuring Trump, where there is quite a bit of reason to believe that there is a problem. There is no reason to think that the polls about the press have similar problems. Likewise, conflating Trump's support or the percentage of people who constitute the basket of deplorables with those who distrust the press is also problematic.

On February 18 2017 12:19 Gahlo wrote:

Nobody called him a facist because of it. They just noted it's a common tactic that facists have used in the past. Let's not jump the gun on jumping the gun.